Bully Boys

Bully Boys is built on a single idea, that bullies can be made to feel what they inflict, and it is applied to two stories. In the lighter one, Laura is looking after Greg Willis, the ten-year-old son of friends of Harry's who are on holiday. Greg is withdrawn and does not want to go to school. Waiting to collect him one day, Laura sees his games teacher, Nick Fuller, bullying him.

She and Rocky give Nick a taste of his own treatment. Rocky arranges a rugby match with friends playing on both sides, and Laura, taking advantage of the fact that Nick fancies her, invites him to watch. Rocky says he has twisted his ankle and cannot play, and a substitute is needed. Nick is the only man available. Greg watches from the touchline as Rocky's friends on the other side tackle Nick as hard as they can.

The serious case belongs to Ken and Harry. Beth Benson, a cleaner at the Drum, asks Ken for help. She and her husband Jack are being plagued by a neighbour who plays loud music and has a ferocious barking Alsatian. Their landlord has offered them another house, but Jack, a keen gardener, will not leave his garden. Ken suspects the neighbour, Geraldine Watters, is being used by the landlord, Charlie Luce, to drive them out.

At the same time, a property developer, James Marian, asks Harry for the security contract on a marina. Ken sees Marian visiting Luce's deserted office and finds out that Luce is in Nottingham Prison. When the Bensons' garden is vandalised, Jack collapses and is taken to hospital.

Ken visits Luce in prison. Luce denies everything and is angry to learn that Marian is trying to evict his tenants so that he can sell the houses. Marian is his financial adviser, and had got him to sign a Power of Attorney in case decisions were needed while he was inside. He is now abusing it. Geraldine, a mature student paying her own way, admits that Marian paid her to frighten the Bensons, and says she thought she was following Luce's instructions. When she learns the truth, she changes sides.

Harry gets some friends from the pub to kidnap Marian and take him to a scrapyard owned by one of them. Threatened with the crushing of the car he is sitting in, Marian signs a release from the Power of Attorney and resigns. They give him a gold clock as a leaving present, and Luce agrees to restore the garden.

Bernard Dempsey and Kevin Sperring wrote the episode and Brian Lighthill directs, with Denis Lawson as the developer.

The strength is the matching of method and punishment. The teacher is hit by the rugby team and the developer is frightened by the car crusher, and the episode takes pleasure in both. The weakness is that Marian's kidnapping is rough justice, played as a joke, for an offence the law might have handled.